Extended Curriculum

Dual Credit Courses – Marshall University

The following classes are available for junior and senior students to take as dual credit, which means they receive college credit through Marshall University at the same time they are receiving high school credit:

The fee for the 2018-19 school year is $25 per credit hour, which can vary from year to year. MU sends a liaison to our school to enroll students. During the second week of each semester, the liaison goes to each class, talks to the students, informs them of how it works and has the student fill out a registration form. It is up to the student to inform the teacher, after getting permission from his/her parent/guardian, if he/she is going to take the class for dual credit. Checks are to be written to SJHS and are due by the fourth week of each semester. If you have any questions, please contact Mrs. Appell by email at karen.appell@stjosephhs.org.

West Virginia Virtual School

The West Virginia Virtual School provides FREE online courses for students when those courses are not available in their high school, or if their schedule prevents them from taking a course associated with their college and career goals. Students who choose to take a virtual school course shall complete the course requirements by the last day of school for the students during the current school year. Seniors must complete all coursework by their last day of school. Visit this link for a list of classes that you can take online for High School credit.

Qualified high school students have the opportunity to take Marshall University courses totally online. Scholarships are available for qualifying students. Course listing is tentative and may change. If you have had a dual credit course, you are already admitted to Marshall. However, Online College Courses in the High Schools courses are not designated as dual credit courses. Be sure to check academic requirements at your future college or university.

Deadline information: All paperwork and fees must be received by deadline dates: New students: 2 weeks prior to class start date. Admitted students: Friday before start date.

Contact: (304) 696-7084

Free College Courses:

Harvard and MIT have started a nonprofit hub at edX.org, where you can learn Greek classics from a Harvard professor or quantum mechanics via Berkeley.

Don’t want to wait for a course to start? Carnegie Mellon has free self-paced courses that you can try anytime at oli.cmu.edu, and so does the nonprofit Saylor.org.

Another for-profit site, Udacity.com, it mostly offers classes without a university’s stamp, but it features star teachers like founder Sebastian Thrun, a co-inventor of Google’s experimental self-driving car, who teaches artificial intelligence for robotics.

The MIT-built MOOCs offer a chance to earn an”MITx” — not MIT — credential that won’t on its own help you toward a degree but might look nice at the bottom of a résumé next to other continuing-ed classes.

Even if there’s no cheap and easy back-door into an Ivy league university like the University of Pennsylvania, a student may soon be able to take what he or she learns from the Penn-taught calculus class on Coursera.org and have another college award the credit.

Coursera’s Penn calculus class is one of four college-level MOOCs — all on Coursera — with an ACE recommendation as of early April. To get credit, you first must pay Coursera a fee, currently $128, for verifying your identity and proctoring the exams. (This could be one way Coursera someday makes money.) This doesn’t, however, guarantee a college will follow the ACE recommendation and award credit. It’s up to the student to persuade their school.

Plenty of free resources are available online for students who want to learn a new topic, but these free options don’t generally lead to college credit. Students who want to earn college credit might want to look for online options that charge a small fee in exchange for access to online lessons. These fee-based courses can help students earn alternative forms of college credit.

Fee-based courses:

Education-portal.com is an Education Portal that offers this style of distance learning with quick, engaging video lessons and self-assessment quizzes. Students can also find free transcripts for the video lessons. Both the transcripts and the video lessons can lead to college credit. Students can find a number of courses through Education Portal’s extensive online resources.